Can Poetry Matter?

by Dana Gioia

Book Overview

In 1991, Dana Gioia's provocative essay "Can Poetry Matter?" was published in the Atlantic Monthly , and received more public response than any other piece in the magazine's history. In his book,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555971776
• ISBN13: 9781555971779
• Release Date: October 1992
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Worth One's Time!

The title essay wasn't the best thing about this book on matters poetical, in my view. Whether poetry does matter or whether poetry can matter are two different questions, but Dana Gioia treats these two as one and the same and, in the end, doesn't answer it, except incompletely. Yes, poetry CAN make your life happy . . . . he weakly suggests at the end of the piece. The essay on Robert Bly (the "successful poet") was stunningly vicious and blessedly beautiful at the same time: highly insightful. The two separate essays on Weldon Kees and Robinson Jeffers ("Strong Counsel") were perfection in analysis and appreciation of these poets' works (except for one mistake: the author is wrong in stating that Robinson Jeffers never won any award in his lifetime. Mr. Jeffers won many awards - seven that I know of. Mr. Jeffers was not partial, however, to receiving awards, and he wrote a poem about how one should avoid all publicity.). I felt deep gratitude as well for one essay entitled "Short Views" in which the reader is teased with the pleasures to be found in the poetry of Tom Disch (now deceased as of July 4, 2008 by suicide), Radcliffe Squires, and Theodore Weiss. The essay "Business and Poetry" never answers the question why poets do not write about business in their poems, though the author gives hints feints here and there. Ted Kooser was pleasingly and carefully examined as a minor regional poet. Two essays devoted to the New Formalism did not themselves contain any major ideas to blow one away with insight or appreciation particularly. They merely do the job of showing that it exists on the contemporary scene, and Dana Gioia himself is a practitioner (though he carefully omits to say). No mention either is ever made of Stephen Dunn or James Wright in any of these essays. I can only wonder why Dana Gioia mentioned other poets less well-known than these two men. But he does not even mention Cavafy, and Dana Gioia published a poem referencing this poet's name in the title. It may be simply the author could not include these poets in these essays out of an embarrassment of riches. These essays are seriously worth your time.

Poetry Saved My Life!

DOES POETRY MATTER? YES! Yes! Yes! Without poetry, I may have ended up like Plath, Sexton, Woolf, or who the hell knows! Poetry nutured me, comforted me, fed me, loved me......the flowing words of Oliver, Gluck, Lee, Keats, and yes, Sylvia Plath's gorgeous confessional poetry-- entered my mind and body like a medicine of vowels, syllables, metaphor, and music. Dana Gioia's book "Does Poetry Matter," was an eye opener. "People who support the arts, who attend foreign films and serious theater, opera, symphony, and dance; who read quality fiction and biographies,; who listen to public radio and subscibe to the best jounals. (They are the parents who read poetry to their children and remember, once upon a time in college or high school or kindergarten, liking it themselves.) No one knows the size of this community, but even if on acceps the con- servative estimate that it accounts for only TWO PERCENT of the United States."---CAN POETRY MATTER? This blew my socks off! I realized I was in the minority, but this is completely unbelievable. Is poetry really dead? If so, I am mourning her exisistence. "In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendor of its own existence." Does Poetry Matter? Yes! But we need to make poetry available to everybody, not only the intellectual, rich, and culturally fortunate---We need to make the words mean something for everybody, everywhere. Dana Gioia continues speaking of the intellectual community as though they are the the chosen few; the saviors of lost verse; the people who can resurrect the promised land... But isn't this the reason poety has died in the first place?--because the aloofness of the so-called "True Poet" will not allow anybody else inside their worlds; that being the world of intellectualism and academia. They say that poetry is dead. I don't believe it! I wont believe it! But if Gioia thinks that the only people who can possibly appreciate poetry are the literary intellectuals, he is dead wrong. Gioia says, "These conventions may once have made sense, but today they imprison poetry in an intellectual ghetto." THE GHETTO!!---Yes!! a perfect place to begin displaying the words of Li-Young Lee, E.E. Cummings, Anne Sexton, Robert Bly, etc... Lets get out there--and change the world for everybody with words, color, metaphor, similie, rhythum... I don't give a damn if they can interpet it or understand it---Just read it! Love it! Appreciate it! And allow the vocabulary to pour through your body like liquid music!

An insightful book

The title essay in this book is by far the most important. It's well worth at least checking this book out from a library just to read that first essay. As a poet in an MFA program, I am currently experiencing the severance from the rest of society and alienation from literary criticism that Gioia describes so well. He's right on target. I'm not sure about some of his prescriptions for moving poetry back into public interest (i.e. reading from the work of other poets at one of your own readings), but the fact that he is able to articulate poetry's problems so well should at least get writers thinking about our own solutions. Incidentally, the rest of the essays do decline in quality through the course of the book, but I nevertheless found the final essay on New Formalism worthwhile. I actually didn't know much about the movement other than some mildly disparaging remarks made by various professors during workshop, so Gioia's perspective was refreshing.

opening essays of book are essential reading for our age

The Kirkus review of "Can Poetry Matter?" is pretty much right on target. The opening essays of the book are a necessary (and necessarily condemnatory) critique on the current state of poetry in America. The articles on Kees, Jeffers, etc., are less impressive, and the review reprints which end the book are even less so. Still, the strength of the first few essays outweighs these drawbacks.